Polygnotus

“ Stealthily creeping up the sands till she could get behind the cover of some bushes before she took to her wings, Polynesia went off in the direction of the town; while I remained alone upon the shore fascinatedly watching this unbelievable monster wallowing in the shallow sea.
It moved very little. From time to time it lifted its head out of the water showing its enormously long neck and horns. Occasionally it would try and draw itself up, the way a snail does when he goes to move, but almost at once it would sink down again as if exhausted. ”

“ A polype, feeding on minute annelids and crustaceans which, flitting through the water, come in contact with its tentacles, and limited to that quantity of prey which chance brings within its grasp, buds out young polypes which, either as a colony or as dispersed individuals, spread their tentacles through a larger space of water than the parent alone can; and by producing them, the parent better insures the continuance of its species than it would do if it went on slowly growing until its nutrition was nearly balanced by its waste, and then multiplied by gamogenesis. ”

“ Polygonum has a very wide distribution spreading from the limits of vegetation in the northern hemisphere to the mountains of tropical Africa and South Africa, through the highlands of tropical Asia to Australia, and in America as far south as Chile. Most of the genera have, however, a limited distribution. ”

“ The Polynesian genera are 4;—Tatare, Todiramphus, Cyanoramphus, Coriphilus, and one recently described genus, Serresius, an extraordinary form of large fruit pigeon, here classed under Carpophaga. These remote groups have thus all the character of Oceanic islands, even as regards the rest of Polynesia, since they possess hardly anything, but what they might have received by immigration over a wide extent of ocean. ”

“ I hesitated, and at last spoke the Polynesian that means tens upon tens multiplied indefinitely—"there are as many as the drops of water in the lake we saw from the ledge where you found us," I continued; "many as the leaves on the trees without. And they are all like us, but varyingly." ”

“ It has required almost a century and the combined efforts of travellers, geographers, physicians, linguists, and anthropologists to establish the origin of the Polynesians, to follow their migrations, and to determine the date of them. But when this work is once set on the right track, human history is found to be enriched by a magnificent page, which gives another testimony to the intelligent activity of the human race and its conquests over nature. ”

“ Only occasionally does a helping creature appear. There are practically no animal stories, [xv] for the sufficient reason that the Polynesian did not have opportunities for forming a wide animal acquaintanceship. He brought the pig and the dog to the Islands with him; and the shark and the turtle, the owl and the plover, were the only creatures that aroused an interest in him. Even the way of counting things is changed when we get into Polynesian romance: instead of three, seven, and nine, we have four, eight, and sixteen for the cabalistic numbers. ”

“ Thus the resemblances between Hawaiian and Polynesian snails, and the closer similarities exhibited by the species of the various groups of Polynesia, are intelligible as the marks of a common ancestry in a widespread continental stock, while the observed differences show the extent of subsequent evolution along independent lines followed out after the isolation of the now separated islands. The principle may be worked out in even greater detail, for it appears that within the limits of one group diverse forms occupy different islands, evolved in different ways in their own neighborhoods ”

“ There can be little doubt that many {301}Polychaetes are very "plastic," and can adapt themselves to changed conditions of life with considerable ease; for Nereis diversicolor, Arenicola marina, and others live equally well in water of very different densities, and with a different food supply. The great variety in the "habitats," and presumably therefore in their food supply, etc., exhibited by many Polychaetes, as well as the great variation observable in some species of Polynoina, and the close affinity of the species and genera of this sub-family, lead us to the same conclusion. ”

“ The inhabitants of Polynesia, are, like all those whose faith is primitive and simple, devoted to the worship of the Sun, which they regard as a divinity; and which they imagine at one time to have been a human being: they believe he married his sister, who, when all the rest of her family came upon earth, remained by herself in the skies, and from their union sprang the months. ”

“ Besides possessing in Fiji and Samoa peculiar species, the islands of Western Polynesia have in A. plumosa a species common to Fiji, Samoa, and New Caledonia. Another species, A. costata, is restricted to Eastern Polynesia, occurring in the different islands of the Tahitian Group as well as in Rarotonga. It is possible that the Pacific species may be connected with A. scholaris, a species possessing the range of the genus with the exception of Polynesia. The long ciliated or hairy seeds, six to nine millimetres in length, are fitted for transport by the winds and in birds’ plumage. ”

“ Polype-beds, and the cells, which they contain, are commonly spoken of as being the work of polypes. They are compared to the honeycomb made by bees. It is more exact to say, that coral, and other coralline bodies, have the same relation to the polypes united to them, that there is between the shell of a snail and the snail itself, or between the bones of an animal, and the animal itself. Mons. Donati's words are as follow. “I am now of opinion, that coral is nothing else than a real animal, which has a very great number of heads. ”

“ The bud grows, an opening appears at its distal end, a circlet of tentacles arises about this mouth-opening and a new polyp individual is formed. This individual may separate from the parent or it may remain attached to it. By the development of numerous buds, and the remaining attached of all of the individuals developing from these buds, a colony of polyp individuals may be formed, plant-like in appearance. The various polyp individuals of a colony may differ somewhat among themselves, and these differences are correlated with a division of labor. ”

“ The polypi keep themselves concealed for two months in the year; they do not live beyond two years, and always die of consumption. I must not omit here the observations which Lucullus, the proconsul of Bætica, made with reference to the polypus, and which Trebius Niger, one of his suite, has published. He says that it is remarkably fond of shell-fish, and that these, the moment that they feel themselves touched by it, close their valves, and cut off the feelers of the polypus, thus making a meal at the expense of the plunderer. ”

“ Animal Colonies.—These examples, as well as those furnished to zoologists by the consideration of the polypi which have produced by their slow growth the reefs, or atolls, of the Polynesian seas, do not, however, prove the perennity of living beings. The argument is valueless, for it is founded upon a confusion. It turns on the difficulty that biologists experience in defining the individual. The oak and the polypus are not simple individuals, but associations of individuals, or, to use Hegel’s expression, the nations of which we see the successive generations. ”

“ On the outer edges of the reef the coral polyps flourish in the most vigorous way. There they are as completely provided for as in a County Council Utopia. The breakers bring them the food on which they live; the water and the climate suit them exactly. The only blot on their lives are the occasional storms which break off fragments of the coral foundation on which they live. But even this, while it is disastrous to the individual polyp, is for the good of the community, because these -65- blocks as they roll down form a new foundation on which new generations of polyps can grow and feed. ”

“ Since it is reasonable to suppose that the food plants which the Polynesians shared with the tropical peoples of both continents were carried by them across the Pacific, it is also reasonable to seek the origin of these widely distributed species on the continent which gives evidence of the oldest and most extensive agricultural activity, and to the question in this form there can be but one answer. ”

“ Those who deny the powers of the Polynesians as navigators, quite neglect to explain how it is that certain plants and animals, found in the possession of the Polynesians when the first intercourse with Europeans took place within the last two or three hundred years, came to be naturalised in the places they were, and are, found. It is quite clear they are not native; and the instrumentality of man is the only scientific way of accounting for their presence.
When making voyages to a high island, or a large one, the difficulty of a land fall is not great. ”

“ They cannot live at a greater depth than fifteen or twenty fathoms, and in defiance of the inclinations which rule human beings, they have the strongest distaste for sun and air; in fact, they die when exposed to it.
Now when the polyp dies its skeleton remains behind it, and millions upon millions of these coral skeletons make a layer of coral. These layers of coral gradually lift the generations of polyps upwards to the surface of the water. But as we have seen, the living polyps die when they get so far, and consequently the reef then spreads outwards. ”

“ As for species, it can be said generally that the different oceanic areas and even different coasts present different species, but we know practically nothing of variation amongst Polychaeta, and many so called species may be mere local varieties, for frequently the descriptions of "new species" are scarcely intelligible. At any rate we know that certain species occur at widely separated localities, for two or three species of Polynoids occur in Japan, and again at Dinard on the French coast. ”

“ In spite of their diffusion over a multitude of islands separated from each other by hundreds and even thousands of miles of ocean, the Polynesians are on the whole a remarkably homogeneous race in physical type, language, and forms of society and religion. ”

“ It is, however, natural to consider a polypus, furnished with a mouth, intestines, and other organs, as a distinct individual, whereas the individuality of a leaf-bud is not easily realised; so that the union of separate individuals in a common body is more striking in a coralline than in a tree. ”

“ The possibility of influence from the astronomically learned Polynesians must also probably be entertained. The people of Santa Cruz and the Reef Islands excel all others in their practical astronomy. The natives of Banks Island and the northern New Hebrides content themselves with distinguishing only the Pleiades, by which the approach of the yam-harvest is marked, and with calling the planets masoi from their roundness, as distinct from vitu, ‘star’. ”

“ We next have those genera like Grewia, Nelitris, Melastoma, Randia, Geniostoma, Tabernæmontana, Fagræa, Bischoffia, Macaranga, and Ficus, that possess in Polynesia one or more widely-ranging species. The agency of the polymorphous species, which I have described in the preceding chapter in connection with the general dispersal of Malayan plants over the whole of Polynesia, is evidently also active when the work of dispersal is restricted to the South Pacific. ”

“ The universal belief in the passing of the spirits of the dead to the west, is to my mind a complete answer to those who hold that the Polynesian migrations were from the east. It is an essential part of Polynesian belief that the spirits rejoin those of the ancient dead and there dwell in a land of beauty and plenty, where the gods supply every want, and with whom communication is constant. The Polynesians would not locate this Paradise in the west, if their ancestral home was in the east. ”

“ When we look toward the zenith or toward the horizon we conceive the distance as a whole; the Polynesian divides and names the space much as we divide our globe into zones. We have seen how he conceives a series of heavens above the earth, order in creation, rank in the divisions of men on earth and of gods in heaven. In the passage of time he records how the sun measures the changes from day to night; how the moon marks off the month; how the weather changes determine the seasons for planting and fishing through the year ”

“ The Polyzoa are chiefly marine, and the common "sea-mat," often erroneously treated as a sea-weed, is a well-known form. A species of another order often picked up on our coasts is the Sertularia, or Sea-Fir, composed of delicate branching stems of a horny-looking substance, which, under a pocket-lens, is found to contain an immense number of small cells inhabited by Polyps. It is instructive to compare the two and note how much more advanced in structure is the Polyzoon than the polyp. ”

“ Nature had placed along the Phoenician coast, or at any rate along a great portion of it, an inexhaustible supply of certain shell-fish, or molluscs, which contained as a part of their internal economy a colouring fluid possessing remarkable, and indeed unique, qualities. Some account has been already given of the species which are thought to have been anciently most esteemed. They belong, mainly, to the two allied families of the Murex and the Buccinum or Purpura. ”

“ Thus the typical hydroid colony starts from a “founder” polyp, which in the vast majority of cases is fixed, but which may be floating, as in Nemopsis, Pelagohydra, &c. The founder-polyp usually produces by budding polyp-individuals, and these in their turn produce other buds. The polyps are all non-sexual individuals whose function is purely nutritive. After a time the polyps, or certain of them, produce by budding medusa-individuals, which sooner or later develop sexual elements ”